Wednesday, August 04, 2010

As
I write this, I am on the train to Washington, to attend a conference
sponsored by the Community Action Partnership on "The New Reality:
Preparing Poor America for Harder Times Ahead." The agenda will include
in-depth discussions of employment, food, housing, health care,
security, education, transportation, and even the somewhat touchy-feely
subjects of community cohesion, communication, and, last but not least,
right before the cocktail hour, culture. The recommendations will be
rolled into a report and the conclusions will be presented at CAP's annual
conference later this month.Poor
America would conceivably be a place of few good jobs, nasty food,
dilapidated housing, unaffordable health care, oppressive yet
ineffectual security, education programs replete with dinosaur-riding
Jesuses, transportation networks composed of run-down pickup trucks and
potholed roads, not much more community cohesion than there is now,
and communication still dominated by the corporate media.But
then what about that strange little topic showing up at the very bottom
of the list—culture? We'd expect the poor to be uncultivated,
unlettered and uncouth, but beyond that, shouldn't we expect a culture
of poverty to evolve, as an adaptation to being poor? To an
anthropologist, culture is an adaptive mechanism that evolves in order
to enable humans to survive and thrive in a wide variety of
environments. To others, it may be a matter of dancing a jig or of
strumming an instrument while crooning. To me, culture is, first and
foremost, a matter of literature.The
Russian author Eduard Limonov wrote of his experiences with poverty in
America. To his joy, he discovered that he could supplement his cash
earnings with public assistance. But he also quickly discovered that he
had to keep this joy well hidden when showing up to collect his free
money. It is a curious fact that in America public assistance is only
made available to the miserable and the downtrodden, not to those who
are in need of some free money but are otherwise perfectly content.
Although it is just as possible to be poor and happy in America as
anywhere else, here one must make a choice: to avoid any number of
unpleasant situations, one must be careful to hide either the fact that
one is poor, or the fact that one is happy. If free public money is to
be obtained, then only the latter choice remains.It
is another curious fact that vast numbers of Americans, both rich and
poor, would regard Limonov's behavior as nothing short of despicable: a
foreign author living in America on public assistance while also earning
cash! It seems reasonable that the rich should feel that way; if the
poor can't be made miserable, then what exactly is the point of being
rich? But why should the poor particularly care? Another cultural
peculiarity: what dismays them is not the misappropriation of public
funds. Tell them about the billions wasted on useless military projects,
and they will reply with a yawn that this is just business as usual.
But tell them that somewhere some poor person is eating a free lunch,
and they will instantly wax indignant. Amazingly, Americans are great
believers in Lenin's revolutionary dictum: "He who does not work, does
not eat!" One of the rudest questions you might hear from an American is
"What do you do for a living?" The only proper response is "Excuse me?"
followed by a self-satisfied smirk and a stony silence. Then they assume that you are
independently wealthy and grovel shamefully.Most
shockingly, there are many poor Americans who are too proud to accept
public assistance in spite of their obvious need for it. Most Russians
would regard such a stance as absurd: which part of "free money" don't
these poor idiots like—the fact that it's money, or the fact that it's
free? Some Russians who are living in the US and, in trying to fit in
to American society, have internalized a large dose of the local
hypocrisy, might claim otherwise, but even they, in their less
hypocritical moments, will concede that it is downright foolish to turn
down free money. And rest assured, they will mop up every last penny of it. Mother Russia didn't raise any dummies.But
let us not blame the victim. What causes these poor souls to leave
money on the table is just this: they have been brainwashed. The mass
media, most notably television and advertising, are managed by the
well-to-do, and incessantly hammer home the message that hard work and
self-sufficiency are virtuous while demonizing the idle and the poor.
The same people who have been shipping American jobs to China and to
India in order to enhance their profits want it to be generally
understood that the resulting misery is entirely the fault of the
miserable. And while the role of the pecuniary motive may be
significant, let us not neglect to mention the important fact that producing mass
misery is a high-priority objective in and of itself.You
see, these are very difficult times to be rich. It used to be that
having a million dollars made you a millionaire—but not any more! Now,
to be perfectly safe and completely insulated from economic reality you
need at least ten million, if not more, and the more you have, the more
unnerving become the wild undulations of the financial markets and the
dire prognostications of the experts. It is getting to the point that
you can make a plausible guess at a person's net worth based on how
nervous and miserable they look.Recently,
I had a chance to see this misery on display. We spent a week
vacationing on outer Cape Cod. We sailed there and back (the wind is
free) and anchored while there (the municipal moorings are quite
affordable). We rowed ourselves ashore and back in our home-made plywood dink and bicycled
around picking edible mushrooms along the bike path. This time of year,
this part of Massachusetts is overrun by stampedes of shiny late-model SUVs
with New York and New Jersey license plates. They are driven by various
subspecies of the middle-aged well-to-do American Office Ogre—the
lawyer, the doctor, the dentist, the banker, the lobbyist and the
corporate businessman—the people who are attempting to run off with all
the loot. The majestic scenery is somewhat spoiled by these surly,
scowling, raspy-voiced ogres and their flabby, overmedicated wives with
voices like an unoiled hinge. When not aimlessly driving around, they
sit in upscale restaurants, toying with their food and gossiping
menacingly. They have long forgotten what it means to be happy and
carefree, and their labored attempts at feigning enjoyment are painful
to watch. You can be sure that the sight of poor but happy people
makes them quite livid.I
am not gloating. I do feel sorry for these poor rich people, and I even
have good news for them: their condition is far from incurable. I know
people who went prematurely gray, lost weight and often woke up screaming
while watching their last $500,000 in savings dwindle to nothing, buried
under a pile of debt, but once the cash is burned off and the dour
creditors abscond with what remains of the property, there is much less
for them to worry about, and this gives them a chance to reevaluate what
is important, what is essential, and what gives them pleasure. And so,
where there is sorrow there is also joy, and we need not grieve for the
poor rich people excessively, because the way things are going their
problems are likely to resolve themselves spontaneously. Keep in mind
that, compared to the formidable, often insurmountable challenges faced
by those who attempt to escape poverty, becoming downwardly mobile is as
easy as falling off a log, and, with a bit of foresight, can be done in
comfort and style.I
have good news for America's poor as well. Although they are
exceedingly unlikely to ever become any richer, they are, in fact, quite
rich enough already. Recently I heard a story on NPR about a poor
family that went around looking for discounted food items at various
groceries and stopping at the food pantry—in their own private minivan!
And so here is a poor family that owns what in many parts of the world
would amount to a bus company! When they couldn't find enough discounted
foods to buy, they still had enough to feed their children, while the
adults skipped meals. This is healthy: hunger is symptomatic of a good
appetite, and, given the excessive girth of most Americans, periodic
fasting is a prudent choice. What's more, they sounded reasonably happy
about their lot in life.And
so, a poor but happy and carefree future may yet await a great many of
us, both idle rich and idle poor—one happy though rather
impoverished family. But in order to achieve that we would have to
change the culture. Let it be known that free lunch is a very good thing
indeed, no mater who's eating it or why, and never mind that Lenin said
that "He who does not work, does not eat." And while we are at it,
let's also dispense with the hackneyed adage that "Work will set you
free" (Arbeit Macht Frei)
which the Nazis liked to set in wrought iron atop the gates of their concentration
camps. Let us consign the communists and the fascists
and the capitalists to the proverbial scrapheap of history! Let us
instead gratuitously quote Jesus: "Behold the lilies of the field, how
they grow. They labor not, neither spin. And yet for all that I say unto
you, that even Solomon in all his royalty, was not arrayed like unto
one of these... Therefore take no thought saying: What shall we eat? or
What shall we drink? or Wherewith shall we be clothed? ... Care not
therefore for the day following. For the day following shall care for
itself. Each day's trouble is sufficient for the same self day." Amen.